Today the Denton, Texas, Independent School District begins grading based solely on learning and knowledge. This just might change education in the United States forever.

Everyone in Denton is talking about it. At the big Distance Teaching conference where I spoke this month, a woman from the University of Texas Denton noted that faculty there are wondering about the implications for their institution.

Best of luck Vicky Christianson and everybody at Denton ISD. Stay with it.

The feminist myth on why women don't go into STEM is in its last desperate stage. The myth is close to dying.

The myth, which was true decades ago, is that the reason women don't go into STEM, or stay in STEM, is because of male sexism and male chauvinism.

Male chauvinism did keep women out decades ago. My uncle was a doctor who was deadset against women becoming doctors. My housemate had to fight sexism in her vet med graduate school in 1976.

But the argument today is that male engineers are more sexist than male engineers, and that male food vets are more sexist than small animal vets - - and there is absolutely no evidence of that.

In fact, the head of the veterinary school association has written me several times about the shortage of food animal vets, and never once mentioned male chauvinism as a possible reason. Today women choose NOT to go into engineering and food animal vet med and computer science. My brilliant co-author Julie Coates has come up with substantial irrefutable evidence on that.

At the Gogebic County Fair in Michigan this month. The probability of this girl becoming a vet is good. Some 74% of vet students are female. The probability of this girl becoming a food animal vet, even though she raised pigs as a girl, is very small. Only 1 in 13 female vet students choose to become food animal vets. Male vet students are 4 times more likely to choose to be a food animal vet.

The American author Winston Churchill in his 1914 novel A Far Country offers - - to us today - - a surprise solution to the problems of society 100 years ago - - lifelong learning.

In fact, most all nonprofit institutions that offer lifelong learning for adults today got their origin, their beginnings, 100 years ago.

They did not call it lifelong learning back then, Churchill called it "re-education." Here's what he writes that society should have:

".....inaugurated and developed a system of democratic education....." (pg 455)

"....the simple and practical fact (is) that the greatest assets of a nation are healthy and sane and educated, clear-thinking human beings....." (pg 457)

"....the vast majority of people of voting age in the United States were under the obligation to reeducate themselves." (458)

"This meant the development of a new culture, one to be founded on the American tradition of equality of opportunity..." (pg 459)

On the last page of the book he outlines his solution:"My plan is that we try to educate ourselves together, take advantage of the accruing knowledge that is helping men and women to cope with the problems, to think straight." (pg 508)

It was a good solution. 100 years later, it still is a good solution.

Another "view from the canoe": Presque Isle river in a national forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Faculty should read their own psychology textbooks, because they do not teach their students values.

All the literature says that values are formed by age 10 or 11. By the time children get to high school, much less college, their values have already been formed.

One of the big arguments in favor of grading behavior is the teaching of responsibility, which of course teachers don't do. Because values are formed much earlier in life.

I experienced this when I taught my foster son how to drive at age 14. Twenty years later, he drives fine but he drives like his biological mother drives, not like how I drive. The research says we form our driving habits well before we learn to drive.

Morning on the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage, a large public lake area in northern Wisconsin, created by Republican Governor Tommy Thompson back in the day (1990s) when moderate Republicans did good conservative things for conservation. Today this act for the public good would be regarded as communist.

Gen Y, with its huge numbers and very different generational needs, style and values, appears to already be threatening to Gen X and Boomers.

At the big Distance Learning and Teaching conference in Madison this week, a Gen Xer came up and asked whether Gen Y would leapfrog her in getting promotions. And a Boomer said I was stereotyping Boomers as lagging in tech skills, but the underlying message was she was threatened by being outnumbered by Gen Yers in just a few years.

You can see where we are in re-creating government for the 21st century by looking back 100 years.

When the American author Winston Churchill wrote A Far Country in 1914, many of the big changes of that decade had yet to be formulated into law - - the income tax and women's right to vote probably the two biggest not yet done.

And yet Churchill points to the future, to the struggle, to the possibility that government can be returned to the people. He writes:

"During the earliest years of the new century the political atmosphere had changed, the public had shown a tendency to grow restless...." And then he notes the perspective of the rich "....and everybody knows how important it is for financial operations, for prosperity, that the people should mind their own business."

"The forces of 'privilege and corruption' were not much alarmed....and the public as yet hadn't shown much interest in the struggle being waged in its behalf."

And yet, with change so hard and so slow, Churchill points to the future, points to hope, noting about the man defending the people:

"He has queer notions about a new kind of democracy which he says is coming."

Indeed that new kind of democracy did come, in just a few short years. It can be our future for government in the 21st century as well.

100 years ago there was an identical battle over whether government should serve the rich, or the entire citizenry.

From A Far Country by the American author Winston Churchill, the lead character represents the rich, while a former college acquaintenance struggles to advocate for the majority of people in the community.

With the same words, the same thoughts as today, the advocate for the general public says:

"Politics are only conducted, now, for the lpurpose of making unscrupulous men rich, sir."

"They are on the side of the powerful, and the best of them are all retained by rich men and corporations. And what is the result? One of the worst evils, I think, that can befall a country. The poor man goes less and less to the courts."

"Eat or be eaten- - that's what enlightened self-interest has come to."

But trouble was brewing. As the 'hero' defending the rich noted, "We knew that the happy hunting-grounds are here and now, while the Reverend (minister) continued to assure the maimed, the halt and the blind that their kingdom was not of this world, that their time was coming later. Everybody should have been satisfied, but everybody was not."